Saturday, October 23, 2010

Stanley Fish, Part II on the Humanities

Stanley Fish responds to the flood of comments that he received on his recent posting on the NYT that claimed that the humanities don't pay. This piece is better but he concedes too readily to administrator mumbo-jumbo. The comment below from Christopher Braider in Boulder, CO, states my views so well that I'll let him do the talking. The only thing that I would add is that in the last decade the number of faculty in Big Science at many R1 institutions has increased--administrators presumed that their salaries could be covered in part by large federal grants. But these grants are also drying up and becoming harder to get. So not only do the grants not cover all the costs--which exacerbates the cross-subsidy issue in times of declining state support as Chrisopher notes--federal grants are also becoming harder to get, making the venture capital model of expansion of Big Science all the more unsustainable.

While you've got the basic outline of the financial plight especially of public universities down right, you've still got the arithmetic wrong.

You are of course right that humanities departments don't bring in grant money the way the sciences do. And yet, as you concede, they have still traditionally made a profit since the overheads (including salaries, benefits, and plant and utility costs) are lower than the tuition revenue they generate. And if this was true before the current financial crisis arose, it remains true now since tuition continues to more than cover the costs. The financial situation in the humanities hasn't changed because it has never depended on either external grants (since they have never generated any) or state funding (not needed since tuition covers it all). I'd even go further and claim that the profits humanities departments have actually increased during the crisis. At institutions like my own here in Colorado, salaries have been frozen for two years now and, EXCEPT, typically, in the natural sciences, faculty positions left open by departures and retirements are generally left vacant. Yet tuition has sky-rocketed, with the result that the ratio between faculty costs and tuition revenue is even more favorable than it was before.

So what has really changed if it isn't the profit-loss calculation for the humanities? What has changed is that the catastrophic decline in state funding means that universities no longer have a way to cover the structural shortfalls created by Big Science. While science departments do indeed bring in extra-mural funding, that funding has NEVER sufficed to cover the cost. This has meant that the losses the sciences incur had to be made up with state money. Once state money dries up, that leaves only two options: rapidly rising tuition for ALL students, whatever their majors, and cannibalizing the rest of the institution to pay the bills the sciences run up.

Until this basic fact of life is faced for what it is, administrators will continue to do what your report of their standard defense of their policies leads them to: invest ever more money in big science (as, here in Colorado, they go on doing in absolute as well as relative terms) in the HOPE that the research dollars science brings in will somehow, someday catch up with the costs. The problem is that, even in the good times, they never caught up with the costs; and they're much less likely to do so now precisely because the general public funding situation is so bleak.

The result is this: what looks like hard-eyed realism is in fact fantasy, and all the more clearly so when administrators talk, as they do, of potential patents--the idea that molecular biologists, for example, will make some breakthrough in bio-technology that will in turn brings floods of money pouring in in the form of huge licensing fees. Nothing of the sort has ever happened, and certainly nothing on the scale necessary to recoup the giant losses sustained in providing the infrastructure big science needs.

3 comments:

The same nonsense Fish peddles has also been spouted, approximately, by one of our friends from Columbia. You know, the place where Our President gets his advice about how to run the University of Minnesota.

See: How to Pump a Bad Idea Into A Book(Mark Taylor's dreadful "Crisis on Campus" screed.link: http://bit.ly/9f7a5W

Here may be read excerpts from a book revenue entitled: "Does this Man Deserve Tenure?" by David Bell, a history prof at Princeton and former Arts & Sciences dean at Hopkins. (Sounds like presidential material to me...)

Bell deliciously skewers Taylor. Maybe President Bruininks should invite him for a Great Conversation. It would be fun to watch.

I stumbled on another excellent and related post by Christopher Newfield on his blog: "remaking the university."

Chris is a UC-Santa Barbara English prof who has written the answer to books like those by Fish and the other misguided effort pushed by Our Leader in the latest so-called Great Conversation.

Although I like to think of the post as being about Fish or Cut Bait, the author's title is: Humanities Cuts of Choice.

Link: http://bit.ly/cICXIO

The main point here is that either humanities are ALREADY paying their own way, OR that the sciences/research are actually requiring much more subsidy than the humanities. Newfield cites numbers such as $720 million lost on $3.5 billion in gross research revenues at UC.

He also quotes our old boss, Mark Yudof, as admitting: "the humanities indeed can be seen as cross-subsidizing science, engineering, and similar departments."

It is time to dissect out two major classes of expenditures at the U. Those being: educational expenses and research expenses. Once these numbers are available we can rationally decide how we want our resources [tuition and state funding] to be allocated in a fair and equitable fashion.

Currently, the Morrill hall Gang takes their cut off the top [the cost pools] and some hamburger is thrown over the fence for us to fight over...

It is clear that tuition increases are NOT used to better or even maintain educational quality.

RECLAIM THE U!

As the administration has come to dominate instead of to serve the university, intellectual and educational values have been displaced by market ones like "efficiency" and "productivity." Faculty and students have been commensurately marginalized in the governance of the institution. We do not say that the university ought to be inefficient or unproductive, but we do demand that values central to scholarly and scientific inquiry and education be restored to the center of the university's endeavors, including (indeed, especially) the management of its finances. Our efforts have a fivefold focus:

1. Governance. The university should be governed by those who carry out its mission of teaching, research, and public service. At present faculty have little meaningful role in making decisions that are handed down from central administration. This state of affairs results from manifold causes, faculty in generations gone by having ceded governance responsibilities to an ever-growing body of administrators. We the faculty must resume our proper role in making, rather than merely reacting to, the decisions that govern our work and our workplace.

2. Transparency in budgeting. The administration should make all information about the university's finances, including expenditures as well as revenue sources, readily available to the public in comprehensible form. At present it is difficult or even impossible to find out how the university spends most of the funds at its disposal, effectively prohibiting people without privileged access and knowledge from scrutinizing the administration's allocation of financial resources. (N.B.: All these resources are public funds once they enter the land-grant institution's coffers.) We recommend an independent audit to open the university's budget to such scrutiny.

3. Accountability for the administration. Every office within central administration should be required to provide to the public an account of what it does, what relation its work bears to the university's mission, and why it costs what it does.

4. Workload. The administration demands greater "productivity" from faculty and staff at the same time that it reduces the resources we need to produce anything and increases the burdens that hamper our work. If resources are withdrawn, our workload must be reduced, not increased. We do not want to do less teaching or less research, rather, we demand that unfunded mandates handed down by the administration be eliminated. Meanwhile, adequate support must be provided to enable efficient and productive work.

5. Integrity of the university. We reject the notion that the university can somehow achieve excellence by cutting programs, faculty positions, and curriculum. All disciplines and all modes of inquiry are interrelated, whether directly or distantly; to excise one element affects others, and ultimately damages the whole. This principle of intellectual integration is encapsulated in the motto of the University of Minnesota, commune vinculum omnibus artibus, which is a phrase derived from the argument of Cicero that the study of poetry is essential to a career in law. To unbind the arts from one another, as if any form of human inquiry can stand in isolation from every other, violates not merely the motto but the principle of the University's existence.